


The Haunting of Megatron's Dick

by fascinationex



Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [37]
Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Conditioning, Dubious Consent, Forced Orgasm, Ghost Starscream, Haunting, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Orgasm Control, Public Sex, Smut, Starscream is dead, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Undead, but Starscream is still a major character, continuity soup, extremely technical character death, sex injuries, some of these tags seem really serious but honestly it's all pretty light, while also being dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:29:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28045455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: If Megatron had known that killing Starscream would only make him somehowmoreobstructive, he’d have let him live.
Relationships: Megatron/Starscream (Transformers)
Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [37]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1311599
Comments: 67
Kudos: 128





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ### important note
> 
> The Haunting of Megatron's Dick begins with Starscream being killed. I have not tagged it for major character death on the assumption that the major character death warning is usually used for fics where there's, like, DEATH death, and not death as a silly, smutty excuse to have a ghost haunt someone's sex organs. 
> 
> Nevertheless I would not want a reader to be sad, so consider this a warning for extremely technical character death.

If Megatron had known that killing Starscream would only make him somehow _more_ obstructive, he’d have let him live.

At the time, it had seemed like a fair trade: he lost his most strategically gifted air commander, but he stopped having to check that there wasn’t a doomsday drone hiding under his berth to murder him every night. The prospect of actually recharging for multiple hours in a row had seemed like an advantage that couldn’t be passed up—personally _and_ professionally. 

He liked Starscream. Killing him had been stressful. 

The crunch of his plating and the shrieking and begging had been satisfying, because you’d have to be a Prime to speak to Starscream for more than three minutes in row _without_ daydreaming of putting a fist right through his cockpit and ripping out his spark. 

Hurting Starscream was satisfying and cathartic.

But _killing_ him had been... stressful. 

He missed him almost immediately. He had known he would. Missing Starscream, and adapting to his absence, was a problem that persisted for _months_. The air corps had turned into a box full of angry cybercats overnight, and they were taking their time sorting things out. And Thundercracker, while hard working and clever and not an incompetent air commander, had neither the flair or the pure viciousness of his predecessor. (Seekers, unfortunately, respected both flair _and_ viciousness more than competence. Which explained a lot, really.) 

Daily, Megatron noted things he wanted to argue out with Starscream when they next spoke. A scheduling problem. A high-risk strategy. A minor inconvenience that seemed _suspiciously_ timed to put Megatron in a vulnerable position. But then his processor caught up with his new reality, and he had to remember that Starscream was dead, over and over. 

But all of these things were inconveniences and problems— _personal_ problems, _professional_ inconveniences—that Megatron could have predicted Starscream’s death would provoke. He wasn't happy to suffer them, but they were natural consequences of his actions.

It only started getting _weird_ with the dreams. 

Recharge was when a mechanism’s processor did the bulk of its defragmentation, when it assimilated new memory files, cleaned up subroutines, made new associations, flushed memory. 

They rarely dreamed. And when they did, it was almost always the result of trauma. Megatron himself had occasional dreams of—peculiarly, not the pits, but the mines. Collapses. Accidents. He woke from dreams with his plating clamped tightly, slicked down like a frightened mechanimal’s, lubricating along all of his joints and seams like he could will himself to a faster escape. 

He had been close to Starscream for millennia. Antagonistic, often. Hostile, usually. Violent, almost always. But _close_. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Megatron would dream of him. 

But he should, he thought, have been dreaming of his _death_. 

He should probably not, he figured, have been dreaming of the sensation of his deft blue hands—so dexterous, next to Megatron’s thick fingers—creeping slow spider-like finger-paths up his thighs. 

He couldn’t move in his dreams. He just lay there, paralysed, waiting for Starscream’s hands to finish smoothing their way up. He was unsure if they’d reach for his interfacing panels, or his spark chamber, and he didn’t know what they’d do when they got there.

He was supine, helpless. Starscream-of-his-dream could have repaid the favour, torn his spark free.

He woke before the hands got there. He was ravenous, every time, and drank more fuel to compensate for his dry mouth and parched fuel lines. He was itchy and restless, and keenly aware of all sorts of other appetites.

That was—strange. Those weren’t like any kind of dream he’d ever heard of a Cybertronian having. And they were _persistent_. He hadn’t had a mine shaft nightmare in months, so occupied had he been with dreaming of _Starscream_. 

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the medic, when he brought it up at last—obliquely, of course. It woudn’t do to let anybody know he was dreaming of his dead second in command. He had to appear unaffected. 

Weaknesses were not well tolerated in the Decepticon Empire. He’d built it that way. 

Of course, the medic would have been a lot more convincing if he’d looked slightly less disturbed by the idea of dreams that weren’t, strictly speaking, nightmares. 

“They’re not about—”

“About what,” Megatron prompted sharply. 

“About, erm, Primus.” The medic looked away.

This was so unlike what Megatron had been thinking of that he barked a short laugh, cut through with startled static.

“No. No, not about Primus. You don’t have to worry about _that_.”

They could still leave all _that_ nonsense up to Optimus Prime.

His relief was palpable. “Oh! Well. I wouldn’t worry about it, then. It’s not something I’ve heard of before, but nightmares take different forms. Perhaps you’re just not scared of them.”

_This_ was colossally unlikely, of course, but it pleased Megatron to believe that even his nightmares had no power over him. So believe it he did, and he did not worry. 

* * *

In his dreams, Starscream rubbed those long blue fingers enticingly along his interfacing panels, shouldering aside his huge powerful thighs with no effort at all to get access to them. 

“I always wondered,” he mused, and Megatron woke again with a jolt, wondering if that was true— 

Of course, the Starscream he’d _made up_ , in his _processor_ , for the sole purpose of some ridiculous fantasy frag _would_ say that, wouldn’t he. 

His valve was swollen up with fluids: oil for lubrication, redirected fuel for sensation. His interfacing system, stretching much further beneath his plating than valve and spike alone, throbbed. 

Megatron heaved a sigh through his vents. 

Maybe his processor _was_ punishing him for something. 

* * *

Megatron overloaded, hard, crackling and twitching like he hadn’t in—in years, in _millennia_ , and Starscream raised his head from his spike. He drew his fingers from his valve, gentle despite the absolutely obscene oil-slick noise it made, and then sucked the fluids off them, one at a time. 

Megatron watched cynically. His circuits were still buzzing with the heady pleasure of getting off so hard he rebooted. 

“You are definitely not real,” he said, at last. 

Starscream finished up and then licked his lips, like that would do anything at all about the transfluid on his chin, which had now dribbled in a long, slightly luminescent line straight down the cabling of his throat, where it disappeared into his internal structures. If he’d been real, Megatron was absolutely certain he’d have been pitching a fit about that. 

_**NO?**_

Jarringly, the voice didn’t seem to come _from_ the Starscream in his dreams. It echoed, thunderous, in his helm. 

“I did kill you. I remember,” Megatron said drily. “You’re—” 

“Did you really think I’d be that easy to get rid of?” gloated the Starscream between his thighs, painted with his transfluid. 

He wiped a line of it off with his thumb and then licked that, too. 

“You’re a dream,” Megatron informed him. “You’re dead.” 

“You’re half right,” Starscream said, and smiled. 

Megatron woke up. 

* * *

Still. Megatron was recharging a sensible number of hours—sensible for these long days of war, anyway—and he wasn’t worried about what happened in his recharge. 

If anything, dreaming of his traitorous second in command sucking on his spike or licking his valve until he howled every night came with the same advantages regular overload always did. There was no extra charge confusing the subtle signals of his frame and no lag time on his reflexes, and his mood was improved. 

Perhaps Starscream’s ominous commentary made it a confused sort of nightmare, after all. It figured that he wasn’t even competent at _this_. 

* * *

_You’re half wrong, too_ , said a smug voice, during a high command meeting. Megatron continued speaking as though he hadn’t heard it. High command meetings were both boring and astonishingly fast when Starscream wasn’t there to pick apart every single suggestion anybody made, as though anyone but him having a good idea made his own input less valuable. 

“A trine on the east side,” Thundercracker said in response, “can draw their attention away—they know the air corps are our most manoeuvrable troops, they’ll expect them to form the bulk of the attack.” 

Megatron studied Thundercracker for a short, distracted moment. There was no way he’d heard that voice—Thundercracker had mourned Starscream’s loss in the peculiar way of a trine mate. He would have responded to his distinct screeching. 

Thundercracker looked up when the silence stretched. “Sir?” 

“Yes,” Megatron agreed belatedly. “See that it gets done.” 

* * *

A wash off after battle was a wondrous thing. 

Starscream had always been especially fastidious about cleaning up alone or with his own trine. He had been constructed a fighter jet, and had presumably hit the wash racks with a score of other fighter jets in the aftermath of every prior engagement of his existence. Megatron hadn’t argued with him on it, since his rank made it a reasonable privilege to demand—there were _plenty_ of other things to argue with him about, and when Megatron found himself contemplating an argument about his grooming habits, he knew he was scraping the bottom of the barrel. 

Megatron wasn’t as picky. He used exactly the same wash racks as the rest of the army, and by now only the newest of recruits hesitated to use them at the same time. 

This became inconvenient when a ghostly hand dragged its sharp fingertips right up the inside of his thigh. The sudden rattle of his plating when he shuddered was clearly audible over the noise of the running solvents. 

He twitched and slapped at the sensation—where the hand _should_ have been. His plating stung with the impact. The _crack_ of his hand on his own thigh was loud. 

Onslaught glanced his way, grunted, and turned determinedly away again, snagging Vortex by one rotor as he did just to shove him under a nearby spray of solvent. The air of _not my business, not my problem_ was palpable. 

Megatron lifted his hand and clenched his fist. 

The sensation was still there, a pressure on the smooth plating inside his thigh, the sensors registering a touch. But all was still, and it might just have been some—phantom sensation, left over from the fight, or else some weapons discharge had affected his neural network. He could get a medic to check it over if it started to bother him. It was probably— 

The touch slid up, slowly, dragging sharp tipped little fingers right into the seam of his hip. It slipped between the plating there, snagged a notoriously sensitive bundle of wires and _tugged_ , ever so gently. 

Megatron went still. 

Alright. That was not a phantom sensation from battle. 

Delicate fingertips rubbed the closures of his valve panel, gently, gently. He stood still beneath the solvent stream, staring blindly at the metal in front of him. 

His internal systems responded very positively to those touches, because he’d been responding to them for _months_ , senselessly, in his recharge periods. His conscious mind may have found the present circumstances confusing, inconvenient and faintly embarrassing, but his frame had been getting overloaded, very regularly, and it liked it. 

It even _felt_ like Starscream—the Starscream he couldn’t seem to stop dreaming about, anyway. Who the hell knew what Starscream’s hands would have felt like in reality… 

It wasn’t strictly that it was embarrassing to interface where others might see, to Megatron. That was a conceit of the upper castes. There wasn’t much privacy in the pits or in the mines. But there was such a thing as designated, shared spaces used for socialising or rest. Gladiators’ shared rooms, barracks, the rest centres underground. One didn’t see miners _self-servicing_ over their rations, and despite what lurid holovids might suggest, gladiators hadn’t fragged in the hot sands of the pits. 

It would be a little bit embarrassing, then, to overload in the wash racks for no obvious reason and in front of several of his own troops. 

He shook his head and resumed cleaning up anyway. This was distracting. And probably something he should see a medic about. But it wasn’t like it was stopping him from cleaning himself up. He still had to get other people’s fuel off his feet. At least that was a much more familiar problem. 

But it was hard to deny the physical sensation of those hands, gently stroking sensitive patches of plating. Worse still, since they weren’t _real_ and _physical_ , they had no fear of being pinched in a seam. Where there was an opening, the fingers could slip inside, and they stroked at joints and wires and occasionally fuel-plumped protomesh with impunity—and then they returned, always, back to the panel of his valve. 

He squeezed his thighs together, and shuttered his optics on and off at the pressure on his very swollen, very interested interfacing equipment. 

Megatron began to think he had overestimated his own capacity for stoicism when he failed, dazedly, to deny a prompt from his interfacing system in time, and his valve panel slid away without any conscious permission at all. 

Distantly, he could hear Starscream laugh. 

“Did you hear—something?” Swindle asked sharply, an untimely reminder that other people were also trying to use these wash racks. 

Apparently those people were also participating in his hallucinations now. 

“No,” snarled Motormaster. “Shut up.” 

Or not. 

Megatron leaned heavily on one arm, braced on the wall before him. The solvent, still hot and powerful, streamed over his frame, catching in his wide-open seams and trickling into his internal mechanics. It would not have been a maddening sensation, tickling gently and exacerbating every physical feeling, had his sensors been _left alone_. But as it was, they were hypersensitive and hungry, craving and straining for any sensation. His whole frame felt primed and swollen. 

Starscream’s mouth kissed a long, slow trail straight up the inside of his thigh, right where those fingers had started. 

He grunted at the feeling of a long, wet tongue sliding across the swollen opening of his valve. Starscream—the _dead mech_ he had been having _nightmares_ of—knew exactly how he liked to be touched. He knew to warm him up with steady maddening touches. He might even have known why long, steady periods of foreplay felt like such a luxury. 

He definitely knew to lick him carefully and gently, before trying to touch his anterior node. He was patient, steady. His soft, slick tongue breached the outermost rim of his valve and teased at the sensory nodes there while Megatron focused—quite hard—on trying to stand up. 

The solvent was starting to steam around him, vaporising as soon as it came into contact with his internals. 

When he did, finally, clutch his hips in those ghostly claws and give a long, firm lick right across his anterior node, Megatron’s knees tried to unhinge and he sagged forward into the wall. He felt his own face scrunch up, helplessly, in an ugly mask of pleasure. 

His fans whined, high and strained.

The mouth did not let up. It laved him with long, dedicated strokes, just as he liked them, until he was clenching and unclenching his fists, steam streaming from his plating, grunting softly with each choked growl of his engine. He had not forgotten he was in a room full of people, and all he could think was that if he overloaded it would be—embarrassing. And perhaps secretly kind of rewarding. He thought: _let_ them see. And then, frantically: _no, don’t let them see._

“ _Don’t you dare_ ,” he growled under his voice, which was useless. He felt Starscream— _Starscream!_ —smile, wide and smug, against the dripping swollen mess of his valve, and then he slid his tongue, long and hard and decadent, across Megatron’s throbbing, sensitive little anterior node. 

He overloaded with a tight groan between his teeth, shuddering and twitching. He could see, through his dimly cracked optics, the light of the charge crackling between his joints reflecting off the steel wall before him. 

His fans whistled. 

The moment his optics came online again, Megatron snapped his valve panel shut. 

The wash racks were, weirdly, quiet. 

“Is there, uh, like, a technique to that,” someone asked into the quiet. It echoed. 

Megatron pushed off the wall, staggered and whirled on him, optics wild and plating flared to release the steam from within. 

It was Wildrider, and he held up his hands, cringing under Megatron’s huge shadow. “Wow, sorry, I was just _asking_ —” 

“ ** _No_** ,” snarled Megatron. 

“Right, I’ll just—” 

Funny, how fast a room full of brave Decepticon war frames could clear out under the right provocation. 


	2. Chapter 2

That was… bad enough.

Megatron fell back into a pattern of dreams after. For days it was lazy, frustrating teasing, as though the effort of tormenting Megatron in the waking world had been too much and the Starscream-of-his-dreams needed to rest to recover. If that was true, then he chose to do it half sprawled on Megatron, idly rubbing his spike much too gently to actually overload him. 

It was almost a month later, when Megatron had largely written that embarrassing episode in the wash racks off as some kind of—of freak accident, surely?—that it happened again. 

This time it was not in the relative privacy of the wash racks. There was no wall to turn to, no steam to hide the details, no awkward presumption of ignoring what one might see under another’s plating in the wash racks—no. 

This time it was in the mess hall. 

The intervening month had really only given Starscream an opportunity to practice. 

Megatron ended half bent over the end of a table, braced on shaking arms, flushed and slack-mouthed, grunting and gasping as an invisible mouth tried valiantly to suck his spark out through his spike. 

It felt like his entire army was watching with optics laser-focused on his interfacing equipment. Not a single mech left the mess hall that he could tell, and several of them showed up just to crowd around the edges and stare at him. 

It was embarrassing. His armour leaked steam from its seams. His optics went pink and blind with charge, and he overloaded with his mouth twisted into a grimace, clutching at the table and groaning into his spilled energon. 

* * *

“I think I’m being haunted,” he said flatly, feeling stupid even as he said it. 

Hook eyed him. 

“Do you,” he said, in a tone that indicated he did not think that at all, and that furthermore he felt that a psychotherapist, and not a medic, might have been called for. 

“Specifically my interfacing equipment.” 

There was a long pause. 

“Is that so?” 

Since he was already sounding like a lunatic, Megatron looked at the ceiling and added, flatly, “It’s Starscream.” 

Hook cleared his vocaliser in a rush of static, a symptom of nervousness that Megatron was usually pleased to incite. Today, not so much. 

“Lord Megatron. When was the last time you—sought companionship,” Hook said, delicately. 

Megatron made a disgusted noise, got up and left the repair bay. 

* * *

He did end up _seeking companionship_ , for simple want of anything _else_ to do about it. 

Shockwave was loyal, steady, not prone to gossip and extraordinarily disinclined toward romantic attachment. And if he didn’t have pretty wings and a mean streak six mechanomiles long, well, all right, but Megatron had already killed Starscream. 

It helped that all Megatron had had to do was ask. 

“Do you want to interface?” was a yes or no question, and Shockwave was blessedly capable of giving a yes or no answer. 

Shockwave had a pretty valve, with mesh and silicone in shades of purple and yellow biolights that coincided so roughly with its nodes that they had to be naturally occurring, and not carefully designed work. It also had to be naturally occurring because it was quite cute, which was not a consideration he would expect Shockwave to make. Shockwave, in Megatron’s experience, was more about function than form. 

Maybe Hook had been onto something, he thought, when he finally pressed his heavily-lubricating, swollen spike into the achingly soft warmth of that valve. Shockwave was solid, and Megatron could put his hands on him and push him and grab him and touch him as he liked—despite getting regular overloads, he felt abruptly that he had missed this. 

Shockwave rolled his helm back into the berth and made a low rumbling sound from his engine that shook the berth. His strong legs clenched around Megatron’s sides, trying to drag his spike in closer and deeper, and his bulky body flexed in the effort. The silky tightness around his spike flexed, too. 

This was, perhaps predictably, when things began to go wrong. 

Something deep inside Shockwave gave a loud, horrible _crack_. 

Megatron felt a caliper flex, well out of place, on his spike. 

Beneath him, Shockwave had gone very stiff and still. His vents cracked wide open, allowing the scream of his fans to spill forth, suddenly and desperately overtaxed. It was difficult to tell, on a face like that, but Megatron thought the wideness of his optic was mostly a mix of shock and pain. 

_Crack_. It came again. Another caliper did something it definitely should not have been doing. 

Megatron braced his hand on Shockwave’s enormous chest-plates and made to withdraw, but Shockwave flinched and clutched at him. He stilled. 

“Shockwave?” 

“Slowly,” he said, in a voice tight with strain. “I believe my—” _Crack_. Shockwave’s vocaliser cut to static. It was not the good kind of static. Megatron did not wince for him, but it was a near enough thing. “—I believe my calipers are breaking.” 

That was sort of what Megatron had thought. Very slowly, he tried to withdraw his spike. He could feel the sharp edge of something moving and jagged behind the velvety interior of Shockwave’s valve, scraping on the sensors on one side of his spike. 

_Crack. Crack. Crack!_

Shockwave made a noise then. “Stop—stop.” 

Megatron stopped. His spike was still two thirds buried inside Shockwave, but he could feel the pressure of collapsing calipers. 

“How many calipers do you have,” Megatron wondered. Different models had different numbers and types, but it was hard to feel the number of them unless you were counting with your fingers. 

_Crack._

Shockwave winced. “That is all of them.” 

“Ah.” 

“It is no longer advisable to withdraw your spike,” Shockwave said. His optic had gone bright with pain, paler than Megatron had ever seen it—and he had seen Shockwave cut off his own arm. 

“What?” 

“Your spike is currently the last thing preventing prolapse, and then the major tank-side fuel line will be compromised,” Shockwave informed him, with astonishing calm given their circumstances. This time Megatron really did wince. “I have commed a medic.” 

“...Very well,” said Megatron, because he wasn’t sure what _else_ to say. 

Then the medics arrived, spilling light from the corridor in and upon the pair of them entwined in the most awkward embrace possible on the berth, and it became obvious that they weren’t sure what to say either. 

* * *

“I no longer wish to interface with you,” Shockwave commed when he finally got out of surgery for his seven crushed valve calipers. Several of them had had to be pieced together like an advanced, ugly jigsaw puzzle. 

The medics were calling it a ‘freak accident’, but Megatron had seen the looks they had shot at him, and understood quite clearly that ‘freak accident’ was code for ‘the entire base now knows Megatron is a violent sexual sadist’. 

“Acknowledged,” Megatron sent back, and then Shockwave sent him a pointed read receipt and nothing else. 

At least it _was_ Shockwave, he comforted himself. It wasn’t like he’d stop following orders just because Megatron invited him to frag then broke every single caliper in his valve and landed him with a four week recovery from invasive surgery. 

…probably. 

* * *

Starscream didn’t frag him. He sat beside Megatron, the only real-feeling thing in the fuzzy dream-world vision of his room, and stroked his long fingers over the seam to Megatron’s chest plates. 

Beneath it, his spark thrummed, half-frightened, half-excited. 

But Starscream didn’t try to tease it open. 

He pressed his thumb against Megatron’s mouth and pried it open so he could touch his teeth, touch his tongue. 

It was another dream in which Megatron couldn’t move from where he’d fallen asleep. 

“I don’t share well,” Starscream admitted, which was a vast and terrific understatement. Starscream had not even ‘shared well’ with his own trine, let alone anyone else. “So I’m going to have to be enough for you. It’s me or nothing, _Lord Megatron_.” 

Megatron glared at him. 

Starscream patted the side of his face, unbearably gentle. Which was still alarming, because Megatron could feel it clearly and Starscream was, you know, _dead_. 

“You’re going to regret killing me. I’m going to make you suffer,” Starscream promised him, leaning so close that Megatron thought he could feel his mouth on his face. “And I’m never, _ever_ going to leave you.” 

He wasn’t sure if that was meant to be romantic, or a threat. 

Or both. 

Probably both. 

When he woke up, his interfacing system had lubricated so much, so aching and ready for contact, that he had to clean the berth. It put him in a foul mood for the rest of the morning.

* * *

On a truly spiteful hunch, Megatron ordered Skywarp to his berth. He had to order him, because the entire army seemed to be well aware of what had happened to Shockwave. 

Skywarp didn’t seem thrilled, but he showed up, as ordered. Whatever apprehension the rumours had caused disappeared, eventually. Megatron might not have been the most patient and considerate lover in the world, but he didn’t _actually_ go about casually destroying his partners’ equipment either. 

Skywarp had a good time. 

Skywarp had a great time, actually. 

As expected, Starscream wasn’t going to snap every one of _Skywarp’s_ calipers and risk shredding his fuel lines. So Skywarp overloaded five times, squealing and fluttering his wings wildly and squeezing down on Megatron’s spike with all of his perfectly intact valve calipers. 

Megatron… did not overload. And by the time Skywarp had gotten five out of him, and was slumped limply upon him like a pool of seeker-shaped mercury, his spike hurt. His spike hurt… quite a lot. 

It felt… blocked. Somehow. 

“Ohhh,” said Skywarp, when he pulled it out of his valve at last. “That doesn’t look good.” 

It did not look good. It looked like the fluids in his spike had somehow built halfway up the thick textured shaft of it and stopped, and the volume of them had then caused an ugly distention. The plating bowed out obscenely, showing wet, swollen protoform and wire just beneath. That plating was filled with sensors and absolutely not meant to be as flexible as it was now required to be. 

Megatron tested it gently with one finger and flinched. 

“Feels good, though,” Skywarp offered, which was flattering but very unhelpful. 

Wearily, Megatron commed the medics again. 

“Get out,” he sighed to Skywarp. 

Skywarp, shameless, finger gunned at him and disappeared with the soft buzz of a warp engine activating. 

* * *

“Yee- _owch_ ,” said Knock Out expressively. This was _really_ not the medic Megatron had hoped would be on call right then. 

“Well, there’s no actual blockage that I can scan in here,” he said, after a short but painful examination. 

Under other circumstances, a mech might have enjoyed Knock Out’s delicate claw tips just barely scraping the hypersensitive, swollen little nodes that lined his spike. Right now, Megatron gripped the sides of the bed to stop himself ripping the medic’s pretty hands off.

“But we’re going to drain the fluid build up before your spike explodes.” 

“Is that likely?” he asked, through his teeth. 

Knock Out wavered a hand in the air, those delicate claw tips gleaming in the light. “Fifty-fifty,” he admitted. 

Then he looked down at the distended swelling in the middle of his spike and then back up to Megatron’s optics. “It’s your call, glorious leader,” he said sardonically. “Want to risk it?” 

Megatron gritted his teeth harder. “No. Drain it.” 

He almost changed his mind when Knock Out showed him the needle. 

* * *

This time Starscream really _was_ cross, it seemed, because he didn’t show up to bother Megatron in his recharge cycle at all. 

Megatron recharged unharassed. The old mine-shaft nightmares floated to the surface of his processor once more. As annoying as Starscream was, at least he’d spared him the terror of jerking to consciousness in the dark, snarling for the lights, so sure that he was trapped and the roof was an inch before his nose. 

Then, too, he did not overload. He had grown used to the regularity of it: when he recharged, he would overload, and enough time had passed for his frame to adapt to it. When he stopped, it _missed_ those subtle chemical changes. 

He should have been able to overload himself, of course, if he was so very hard up for it. But when he tried, Megatron found he was completely incapable of actually achieving overload. If he persisted for long enough, he could feel the dull pressure of a blockage building up in his spike once again. 

Predictably, Megatron’s mood plummeted. He snapped at everyone, even Soundwave—even _Ravage_ , who was usually exempt from even his worst tempers. 

The Nemesis seemed to mysteriously empty overnight. Decepticons crept around the corridors of his ship like vermin, stepping softly to avoid notice, and when he did come across one of his own subordinates, they avoided his gaze—which just irritated him more. 

He yelled at Acid Storm for the breadth of his wings bouncing right in Megatron’s line of sight, and bent one of Vortex’s rotors for no real reason except that he didn’t like his narrow, calculating looks. 

At length Megatron was forced to wonder if perhaps his life hadn’t been significantly easier when Starscream had had things to do _other_ than sensing when he was about to overload and putting a stop to it. 

But at some point, whatever arcane motive was driving Starscream flipped a switch in his dizzy little processor—if he even had a processor, Megatron supposed, recalling distinctly that Starscream’s parts had been recycled for use in repairs. 

Then the overloads were back—but worse. A lot worse. There were no dreams at all for a little while, then, but Megatron overloaded messily while he was trying very hard to simply go about his day: 

In the wash racks. 

In his berth. 

In the corridor between shifts. Here, any number of Decepticons—suspiciously restored from wherever they’d vanished to, while he’d been in a foul mood—milled around staring at him. 

He could hear them talking, sometimes, although none of them ever wanted to bring it up with him _between_ overloads. 

“Do you think he needs some help,” he heard someone say, from where he was sprawled flat on his back on the floor. 

Megatron rolled his head, red optics narrowing on Ramjet’s thrusters. He bared his teeth, but whatever he was about to say was caught up in a strangled whine as Starscream swallowed down his spike. His tongue worked against the thickly-clustered sensors on its underside, making Megatron arch. 

“Does he _look_ like he needs any slagging help,” Swindle hissed. There was a rustle. Feet and thrusters shifted in his vision. 

Through his cracked optics, Megatron could see Soundwave looming above, staring down with a blank visor. 

Starscream did something absolutely obscene that involved closing his throat tubing in short rhythmic motions, sucking Megatron’s spike down. Pleasure skittered through his sensory system from the throbbing nodes on his spike. 

He could feel another overload building, while his subordinates stared and whispered and wondered what in the pit to do. 

More than one of them seemed to have their own ideas about what to do. Megatron only peripherally noticed Astrotrain reach out to touch his thigh—he was too focused on the thundering of his fuel and the growing anticipation of overload, threatening to blot out all his processing. 

Megatron’s limbs started to shake, spasmodic and uncontrolled. Again. 

The overload sucked him down at last, sending his senses into disarray and eclipsing all his data. 

He didn’t notice at all when Astrotrain lost a finger to the violent, possessive thing that had sway over him, despite his sudden yelp. Megatron was busy screaming hoarsely, overcome. 

Megatron didn’t even notice the energon stains, when he staggered to his feet to try to get on with his day once more. Every new overload seemed to leave him floating alone in some altered state. 

The other Decepticons liked to watch him, confused and horny about it, but none of them tried to touch him after those first couple of times. 

When the dreams of Starscream finally returned, they came back with a vengeance. It felt as though he had taken the time out simply to grow stronger—and then that was truly the end of regular life for Megatron. 

Megatron no longer had normal shifts, or normal recharge cycles: he lived in a wet, swollen, throbbing place. It felt like an altered plane of existence, really, one where his frame was always sunk in murky pleasure, ecstatic in ready anticipation of an overload—or he was floating along in the wake of one. 

He overloaded in command meetings. He overloaded while trying to refuel. He planned strategy with transfluid dripping down his thighs and a buzzing golden haze of cozy, post-overload pleasure in his processor. He wasn’t even much worse at any of his work. 

He overloaded, too, while in the middle of a communication with Optimus Prime, which was _supposed_ to be about exchanging prisoners. 

Megatron had not actually aspired to the reputation of someone who couldn’t help but overload all over himself while goading his enemies about the torments of prisoners under his care. 

“Did he—” Prowl cut himself off, quite abruptly. His optics zoomed in and out softly as his enhanced processor ran overtime. 

“That’s—that’s _vile_ ,” said Ratchet, who was probably not meant to be talking at all, but who couldn’t seem to help himself. His face was twisted in an expression of abject disgust. 

Megatron couldn’t bring himself to care at this point. At his shoulder, Soundwave’s optics didn’t even flicker. Soundwave, at least, had grown used to this. 

The whole faction had, really. And Megatron had grown used to being watched, and admired, and never, ever touched. 

“ _Megatron_ ,” said Optimus Prime, aghast. 

Okay, he cared a little about that. Maddening, that it still meant anything at all to him what Optimus Prime thought. 

There was nothing for it though. He straightened in his seat. “Fine. We’ll agree to an exchange of prisoners for energon. Soundwave—” 

Soundwave inclined his head. 

“—see to it.” 

He cut the communication halfway through what sounded like Ironhide yelling, “What the _hell_ just—” 

* * *

“I think my interfacing equipment is haunted,” Megatron said, flatly. 

At this moment, he did not anticipate being thought of as stupid. 

“Hmm,” said Hook. 

Hook and Knock Out were, uncharacteristically, not even bickering over his scans. 

There was a reason they didn’t usually work together, and it was mostly because Hook’s perfectionism and meticulousness butted right up against Knock Out’s _flair for dramatics_. 

But they both showed up for this appointment, and Megatron wasn’t thrilled to think about why. 

“Well,” said Knock Out, after a long pause. “That would certainly be one interpretation of the, ah, _available data_.” 

“Right,” said Megatron, watching them. 

They watched him back. 

“Well?” Megatron demanded. 

“We’d need to run more tests,” Hook hedged, which was in Megatron’s experience just medic-speak for ‘I have no frelling idea’. 

“Unless it _is_ haunted,” Knock Out added, hopping up onto the medical berth across from Megatron’s. “In which case you might consider employing the services of an exorcist, not a medic.” 

Megatron’s optics narrowed. 

There was a long pause. 

“Do we _have_ an exorcist?” 

Knock Out and Hook looked at each other. Then back to Megatron. 

Ominously, they both had different expressions of profound distaste on their faces. 

“Sunstorm,” said Hook. 

* * *

Even when he’d had a frame to see and touch and hurt, Starscream had been more than a match for anyone his own size. 

The less said about Sunstorm’s efforts to cast the malignant spirit out of Megatron’s spike, the better.

* * *

It ended, as it was destined to, with Megatron clutching Optimus Prime on the field of battle, firing his fusion cannon uselessly into the skies as he overloaded with a groan like a demented animal. 

His knees unhinged totally and he sank down in the mud beneath them, still twitching. 

Optimus’s energon axe buried itself in his shoulder, slicing hard through the fuel lines. He was overloading so spectacularly that he barely registered the pain of it, just that it was _more sensation_. He made a deep, involuntary noise of satisfaction. 

“Are you—” Optimus Prime sounded at first confused, and then he trailed off into incredulity and a sort of distant mortification. 

Probably, Megatron thought dully, he could see the transfluid puddling beneath him, mixing in with the spilt fuel and the mud. Above them, thunder rumbled, an ominous warning of the acid rain to come. 

“You are not the mech I used to know,” Optimus Prime said sadly, as though overloading was some kind of perverse crime, and not the inevitable result of Starscream haunting his spike. His face, always contorted in some emotional agony when they fought, turned blank and hard. 

He wrenched the energon axe from Megatron’s shoulder, leaving him bleeding fuel and oil in thick streaks down his armour. He was already weak-kneed from the overload, and the rush of energon leaving his systems left him lightheaded, too. He wobbled on his knees. 

His panels were wide open, as they usually were these days, and he could already feel Starscream switching his attention from his oversensitive spike to his soaked, throbbing valve. His hips rocked, helplessly. Despite everything, he _wanted_ it. 

“Starscream,” Megatron growled. “ _Curse you_.” 

Optimus Prime looked confused, but it didn’t stop him from swinging the axe. 

The last thing Megatron heard was Starscream’s mean laughter. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you liked something about this please let me know in a comment, if you are inclined to comment. 
> 
> Just the one, fairly open-ended, epilogue to go!


	3. Epilogue

“Are you still sulking?” Starscream wondered, sounding bored. 

Megatron wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake. There was no difference in the room, but that meant little. He couldn’t see him right now, which pointed to being awake. 

Starscream was just invisible hands on his plating, a voice in his head. 

Around him, the grey walls of the Autobot cell stared back, providing no stimulation whatsoever. There were energy bars on one wall, an empty corridor outside, and a camera in the corridor, unreachable but aimed right at his cell, capturing every moment. 

There was no berth. Megatron didn’t doubt that they allowed other prisoners berths, or datapads, or something. But not him. He was on the floor, sitting sprawled and inelegant. His shoulder throbbed, to say nothing of his head. He had lost a lot of fuel when Optimus Prime had slammed the energon axe into his helm—because he’d been too busy _overloading_ to pay attention to the fight. It had been a long time since Megatron had lost any fight, let alone in so humiliating a way… 

And of course Optimus Prime had been too _soft_ to simply kill him. 

He ground his teeth. 

It was alright. Optimus Prime’s softness would be turned to Megatron’s advantage—again. Somehow. 

“I am not sulking,” he said, flatly. He couldn’t beat Starscream into submission now that he was _dead_ , and he couldn’t force him to go away. An Autobot cell had nothing else to recommend it. Just the grey walls, the all-seeing eye of a camera, and Starscream. 

“Oh, no?” Starscream’s voice wondered. 

He could feel him sprawled over his chassis, cockpit pressed against his chest plates, right over the Decepticon brand on his chest where it was battered but still bright. If he didn’t try to look—looked out at the camera, perhaps, or over at the blank grey wall or ceiling—he could see the faint edge of a sharp-edged, Starscream-shaped thing. 

“What do you call this, then?” 

“ _You_ sulk,” Megatron informed him. “ _I’m_ … reassessing the situation.” Perhaps the Autobots could hear him, too—it wouldn’t be odd for a microphone to be attached to that camera somewhere. Let them: they would only hear one, nonsensical, part of a pointless argument. And they already thought he was crazy. 

“Is that what you’re calling it?” mocked Starscream. 

His fingers were already wiggling their way into cracks in Megatron’s armour, plucking once more at the cables and wires beneath them. Megatron didn’t bother trying to stop him. Firstly, he couldn’t; secondly, his frame was used to extremely regular overloads, and it knew he was due one and didn’t much care if his conscious mind agreed. 

He wished, not for the first time, that Starscream was actually there to touch. He usually wished this so he could beat him into scrap metal, but occasionally he also wanted to scratch his fingers gently over his wings and suck on the long cables of his throat and… 

“You’re never going to leave me in peace again, are you,” Megatron muttered, staring up at the grey blank ceiling above. 

“No,” said Starscream, startlingly direct and honest. “You made sure I’d never be free of you. And now you’ll never be free of _me_ , either.” Abruptly the weight and feeling of him was gone, which seemed terribly incongruous given that statement. 

Megatron’s hand moved. He was not the one moving it. It stroked over his abdomen in a very familiar way. 

_It’s more cramped in here than I’d expected_ , Starscream said, a devious whisper from right inside his helm. It was, of course, a backhanded compliment. 

_No_ , thought Megatron. A frisson of horror skittered through him. 

His own fingers flexed. He glanced at them in mounting alarm. 

_Oh, yes_ , smiled Starscream. Megatron’s own mouth curled, narrow and devious. He’d never smiled like that in his life. 

Megatron shuddered from head to toe. His terror was genuine: he wanted to be in control of his frame. He might, if pushed, have been willing to admit that he could see, distantly, why some mechanisms found the safe, careful loss of control—being tied up or blindfolded, that sort of thing—could be exciting, but he had never participated and he didn’t _want_ to. 

His recent history of being unable to control his own overloads had been more than upsetting enough, frankly. 

And now Starscream had his _processor_. 

_You’re being ridiculous_ , Starscream said, not very comfortingly, _it’s not like I’m going to kill you._

Megatron may have winced, internally, at the heavy irony with which it was said. 

_How sweet_ , cooed Starscream, glorying in his ill-gotten control. _You **miss** me._

“I don’t have frelling _time_ to miss you,” Megatron hissed through his teeth. It wasn’t entirely true. He had, somehow, missed Starscream. Briefly. Occasionally. 

His hands walked themselves down to his interfacing equipment with absolutely no input from him, and he felt his own fingers curl around his spike—which was _bare_ , somehow, in that Starscream had already popped his panels in the middle of an Autobot holding cell without his noticing. It felt like some strange alien limb. He could feel the sensation from his hand, and his spike, but each touch was unexpected and strange. 

His fingers were soaked. His spike was positively leaking lubricants, slicking itself down to be buried in a valve that would certainly not magically appear in this cell. 

Megatron’s fingers slid through the syrupy mess and up long the long thick length of it, catching on nodes and ridges, squeezing just right. It felt amazing—more amazing than self-servicing ever should have. Despite the icy fear in his lines, he grunted and rocked his hips. His fingers squeezed, gentle and firm and perfect. He moaned dizzily. 

Starscream laughed at him. _You know I could rip it off, don’t you? Look at these huge paws. You’re strong enough. I could just… **crush** it, couldn’t I?_

That thought made him go cold all over in dread. 

A crushed spike would be the worse injury—the pain would be one thing, but the energon lines would be breached, and could carry tiny slivers of metal from the plating back to his fuel pump. 

_Oh, that’s better_ , Starscream purred. Then he gave his spike another long, slow, luxurious pump. Confused pleasure flooded his sensory network. His senses reeled drunkenly between fear and pure, electric bliss. 

He knew, distantly, that the combination was working him up to an overload that might knock him offline entirely, but he wasn’t thinking about that while Starscream was threatening to rip his spike off. 

When Megatron did overload, it was with lubricant already coating his hands so thick and slippery that he didn’t even really feel the transfluid dripping over his fingers. He could feel his limbs giving a series of short mindless twitches, fibres inside them seizing and contracting with no input from his conscious processes. 

Mostly he felt the slow, delicious burn of the sensors in his interfacing system being overwhelmed, nodes firing randomly, lighting up behind his spike and spreading a long, thick wave of pleasure signals across his whole sensory system. 

He steamed and ticked gently when he was done—which was, of course, when _Starscream_ decided he was done. He licked his fingers. He had no choice about that, either. 

_You really did miss me_ , Starscream said then, idly playing with the seams over his spark chamber. He sounded surprised. 

Megatron sighed heavily through his vents, an audible hitch in his fans. Of course he missed Starscream. They had been—not friends, exactly. But close. Once. 

He hadn’t particularly _wanted_ to kill Starscream, really—beat him halfway to deactivation, certainly, but kill him? No. Starscream was clever, and useful, and sometimes _breathtakingly_ vicious, which was really what the post of second in command called for, in the Decepticon army. 

_Hmm_ , said Starscream, thoughtfully. 

And it had turned out, somehow posthumously, that Megatron might have enjoyed fragging him—under different circumstances. 

He’d give a lot for the opportunity to throw Starscream’s physical body across his berth and pin him down while his wings twitched and thrashed and steadily force him to take the whole length and breadth of his spike. 

_You could have asked._

“You would have taken it as an opportunity to murder me,” Megatron pointed out drily. 

_Yes_ , Starscream agreed. Death had made him staggeringly honest—of course, he was unafraid of the consequences of honesty, now. _But we’d have had fun, first._

Undeniably. Megatron sighed again. He could still feel his hand—Starscream’s hand, sort of—rubbing his chest plates, but it didn’t bother him quite as much now. 

_That’s the overload talking._

Probably. 

They were silent for long, long minutes. Eventually, Megatron thought to close his spike panel, which he imagined was to the relief of whichever Autobot was on camera duty. 

_So_ , said Starscream at length. _Are you ready to stop sulking, now?_

“To what point or purpose?” Megatron wondered, without turning his optics back on. “If you hadn’t noticed, I seem to be imprisoned.” He was sure Optimus Prime would want to talk to him… eventually. 

He could almost _feel_ Starscream looking up at the ceiling, like he couldn’t possibly have been stuck with a thicker companion than Megatron. 

_Well_ , he said, slowly and clearly, as though speaking to an idiot, _if you hadn’t noticed, **one** of us can walk through walls._

Megatron’s optics flickered back online. 

“Ah.” 

He had not, under any circumstances, expected Starscream to be even slightly cooperative. Not now. _Especially_ not now. But there had been a time—a long time ago, dimly remembered, but still, there had been—when Starscream could be relied upon. A wealth of possible, unexpected strategies unfurled with dizzying speed across Megatron’s processor. Some of them had not been accessed in a million years. Some of them were brand new. 

He stilled, right down to his engine. Six conflicting feelings unfolded across his processor at once. A warmth ignited in his fuel tank, where it had been cold for eons.

That shimmery sharp-edged thing climbed right out of him and unfolded into relative existence at his side, between him and the energy bars of the dismal little cell in the dismal little Autobot prison. 

“Get up, Lord Megatron,” drawled Starscream, with one invisible, lingering hand on his arm. “The war’s not over yet.” 

“…Indeed not,” he said, and he got up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (fellas is it gay to usher in a new, weird, slightly kinky era of decepticon supremacy or--)
> 
> That's a wrap for this fic! I hope you had a good time. If there was something you enjoyed about this fic, feel free to let me know in a comment.
> 
> If you'd like to find me elsewhere, I'm [cardio-vore](https://cardio-vore.tumblr.com/) on the dubiously-functional tumblrsite, and [fascination_ex](https://twitter.com/fascination_ex) on the twitter.
> 
> Have a good morning!


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